The Social Construction of What?

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by Ian Hacking

Harvard University Press

Due/Published November 2000, 272 pages, paper

ISBN 0674004124

New in paper (F00)

Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality.

Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse--very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the "culture wars" in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook.

"Ian Hacking [is] the most intellectually curious and imaginative philosopher of science now writing. . . . The stalemate that Hacking brilliantly describes but does not try to break is between many scientists' intuition of the inevitability of quarks and many philosophers' suspiciaon that the claim of inevitability make sense only if the idea of th intrinsic structure of reality makes sense. This teeter-totter between conflicting institutions is, Hacking rightly says, a genuine intellectual problem. Hacking's book is an admirable example of both useful debunking ofd thoughtful and originla philosophizing--an unusual combination of good sense and technical sophistication."--Richard Rorty, Atlantic Monthly

Contents

Preface
Why Ask What?
Too Many Metaphors
What about the Natural Sciences?
Madness: Biological or Constructed?
Kind-making: The Case of Child Abuse
Weapons Research
Rocks
The End of Captain Cook
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Review

"In a talk given in Frankfurt, I said that Sokal’s hoax now had its fifteen minutes of fame. How wrong I was!" -- Ian Hacking

Alan Sokal’s hoax that poked fun at the trend to look at science as a social construct is just one of the many examples of how the subject can enrage passions on both sides of the fence. Taking a step back from some of the vitrol that has characterized the debate, Hacking examines not only what is meant when someone talks about the social construction of something (gender, science, mental health, etc.) but what is the point? and why is it necessary to do so? Hacking’s book is an excellent introduction and exploration of the meaning of this debate. Hacking recognizes how the notion of social construction is a liberating idea but also how it has been excessively and unfruitfully employed (“For all their power to liberate, those very words, ‘social construction,’ can work like cancerous cells. Once seeded, they replicate out of hand.”). In discussing what’s under examination in the battles concerning social construction, Hacking wisely realizes that people use the idea in very different ways. Thus, he examines how the idea has shaped such debates concerning the natural sciences, the nature of mental illness, and the idea of child abuse He also looks at how the research and development of advanced weapons shapes not only the content of science but its forms as well. Finally, in the concluding chapter, Hacking discusses the debate between two anthropologists, Marshall Sahlins amd Gannath Obeyeskere over the relationship between the colonizing Captain Cook and the native Hawaiians. With clarity of style and intelligent insights on a range of subjects, Hacking has provided us with a truly valuable way of thinking about one of the crucial intellectual issues of our day.